thumb|Portrait of William Bowyer by [[John Vanderbank in Stationers' Hall.]]
William Bowyer the elder (166327 December 1737), English printer, was apprenticed to a Miles Flesher in 1679, made a liveryman of The Stationers' and Newspaper Makers' Company in 1700, and nominated as one of the twenty printers allowed by the Star Chamber. Although they published such important, learned works as Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, they also published political pamphlets and advertising bills.
thumb|180px|right|Bowyer in [[T. C. Hansard's Typographia: an historical sketch of the origin and progress of the art of printing.]]
The four Bowyer ledgers, kept by father and son, are one of but four printing houses out of the seventy-four master printers in London in 1724, for which records are extant and offer the earliest example by over 20 years.
A main source for the lives of both father and son is John Nichols' Literary anecdotes of the eighteenth century.